


He sang his grief to all who breathed

by leiascully



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everywhere he goes, there's a song in his hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He sang his grief to all who breathed

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: up to and beyond "The Name Of The Doctor"  
> A/N: I was really struck by the idea of the Doctor and River as Orpheus and Eurydice, given the musical imagery in the second half of the seventh season. The idea that the Doctor took River to the Singing Towers between the events of "The Angels Take Manhattan" and "The Snowmen" is my own headcanon. The myth snippets come from [Bartleby](http://www.bartleby.com/181/241.html%22), the mashed-up love poems come from [here](http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/famous/poems/love/) and [here](http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/875661.Rumi), the names of the stars are [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proper_names_of_stars), and the Doctor's famous last words, are, of course, from Dickens' [A Tale Of Two Cities](http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20413402_20821982,00.html#20822008). I'm not sure this story finished; I'm not sure it can ever be finished.  
> Disclaimer: _Doctor Who_ and all related characters are the property of Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, and BBC. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

I. _Orpheus played the lyre to such perfection that nothing could withstand the charm of his music. The very trees and rocks were sensible to it._

He runs.

He runs from the tombstone with their names etched so starkly into it. He runs from the Angels and the ugly snarl in time. He runs from the ostentatious specter of his grief. He has failed them. He will fail them all, at the last. He runs from himself. An impossible task. History always catches up to him. 

River runs with him, her fingers laced through his and her own grief quietly etched in the lines of her face.

He is grateful for that. More grateful later - he was never punctual. He knows the ending of her story; he imagines that telling of it could last forever. 

They float for a while, taking care of all the TARDIS' little maintenance issues. River knows the labyrinth of the TARDIS' innards almost better than the Doctor does. And it should be perfect. It is very nearly perfect, except that the absence of her parents is always there with them, like an extra place set at Christmas dinner for absent friends. 

There will never be another Christmas dinner in the house with the blue door. He will never bring River to open presents and pull crackers and sneak a peck under the mistletoe. His Ponds are gone - not dead, but gone, and that's nearly worse. What justice is there in a world where Amy Pond restores the world she lost to a crack in time and gets trapped in a tangle of it instead?

"They made their choice," River tells him. "It wasn't about you."

"You'll stay with me?" he asks her.

"For a while," she says, and in her eyes is a sweet promise. He comes to her as a supplicant to the altar, and in her joy there is a kind of absolution.

And one day she leaves, with a kiss and an admonition. "Doctor. Don't travel alone."

He promises faithfully. He forgets. Or more precisely, he procrastinates. He makes excuses to the empty corridors. The perfect companion doesn't come along every day. She or he or it or they could be anywhere, everywhere.

The TARDIS drifts through the universe, the new bulb on top blinking out its lonely message. 

II. _Hymen had been called to bless the nuptials of Orpheus with Eurydice; but he brought no happy omens with him. His very torch smoked and brought tears into their eyes. In coincidence with such prognostics, Eurydice, shortly after her marriage, died._

He would swear that he's only just dropped River off after Manhattan when it happens. It couldn't have been more than a few weeks, a month at the outside - he loses track of time when he's alone, and there's the irony, a Time Lord lost in time. The days run into each other like raindrops on a windowpane. He skips across the surface of time, dipping in here and there. He buys a present for River. He sets history right. He wanders through a museum, counting coup without joy. 

They are gone. They are all gone and only ghosts remain.

He walks through the TARDIS and fears the day that he casts no shadow. That day is still waiting; he has shadows enough now to fall over his path. 

One uneventful day he wanders up from the swimming pool, rubbing the water out of his hair. He pauses to run his fingers affectionately over the controls of his TARDIS. They have seen so many companions come and go since the day they stole each other. He slipped away from Gallifrey with only Susan, but soon enough came Barbara and Ian and Zoe and Jo and Jamie and Sarah Jane and the Brigadier and all the rest. His companions have been his solace. Whatever he has done in his life, he hopes that he has at least added to the pile of good things. 

Even Rose's. Even Donna's. Even Amy and Rory's. 

It still cuts him to the bone to think of them. He hardly sleeps and almost never dreams, but if he did, he's certain he would have nightmares of the last moments in the graveyard with the Angel. The one damnable Angel, the last loose end. As it is, he has to catch himself out of thinking about it.

His fingers catch on something new on the console. Something strange. He reaches for it and the weight is familiar in his hand. 

River's screwdriver.

He drops it immediately, fumbles for it, checks it for damage. It can't be broken. His fingers are numb around it but he holds on tightly.

"No," he says, and his voice isn't even his: it's something darker and lower and rougher, more like a growl than a word. "No, no, no, no." He's on his knees and he can't remember falling. The glass of the floor is implacably cold against his skin. 

"It isn't time yet," he says hoarsely. "It can't be time."

The TARDIS does nothing. Everything is silent and dark.

He sobs until his body shakes and his breath comes harsh, stretched out on the glass, his face buried in his towel. He's crying for all of them: every goodbye unsaid or poorly phrased, every life that faded while he was gazing toward shining glory. But mostly it is for River, his River, who built a beacon to show him all the love in the universe, and the beacon was herself.

III. _Orpheus sang his grief to all who breathed the upper air, both gods and men, and finding it all unavailing resolved to seek his wife in the regions of the dead._

He can't bear it. 

He broods at the open door of the TARDIS. Space is unending, uncaring, blissful oblivion. He wishes the cold would freeze his hearts. And then he shuts the door and goes the wardrobe for his tuxedo. As he dons each piece, careful and fastidious about the white of his cuffs and the gleam of his shoes, he tucks his misery away and stands a little straighter. The cummerbund has that effect, and the white tie. He hasn't steel stays to keep him upright, but he has the dignity of tie and tails. 

He must be strong, for her sake. He mustn't taint this last night of peace. He has always known how her story ends; to alter it in any way would be worse than murdering her. Worse than standing on the wrong side of Rose's wall. Worse than destroying Donna's mind. He could do a little something to soothe the pain of those wounds. Nothing he could ever do would heal the injustice of changing River's story. 

River is delighted to see him, and all the more delighted to hear that they're going to the Singing Towers.

"I've always wanted to go!" she says. "How did you know?"

"You told me once," he says, and leaves it at that. He watches her dress, struck dumb by the grace of her. River Song, once upon a time bespoke to fit his needs, and then remade to fit her own. River Song, his murderer and his champion and and his wife and most importantly and thoroughly herself. 

There are not words to say what she has been to him, what they have been to each other. He could string together every poem that Shakespeare and Neruda and Byron and Rumi and cummings ever wrote and it would never be enough. _gladly beyond any experience I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach She's the grief of my heart, the joy of my eye, whatever is done to me is done only by your doing my darling I want to know the joy of how you whisper "more"._ He could write out their story in Gallifreyan and it would sear the stars from the sky and redraw the constellations. It wouldn't be enough. 

He takes her to the Singing Towers and it is the greatest performance he's ever pulled off, in a long and checkered tour of the universe. She is so merry and his hearts are breaking every minute. He relishes every moment of her joy - proof that he hasn't ruined her life entirely - but each gesture is the last he will ever make to her wearing this face. The last first kiss at the door. The last time he offers her this arm to escort her into the TARDIS. The first and last time he gives her a sonic screwdriver all her very own and look, River, it has a red setting.

"How does it work?" she asks, kissing him on the cheek and turning the screwdriver over and over in her hands.

"Haven't the faintest, dear," he tells her. "Let me know when you've got it all worked out."

She smiles up at him, her eyes dancing. "I shall." 

They run into his younger self, poor lad, on that very first night of all the nights to come, and all he can do is wish himself luck. _It will be the very best thing you've ever done_ , he wants to say, _and the very most hearts-wrenching._ But he suspects that he knew that in his bones from the first moment he saw her face behind the shadowed glass bubble of her helmet. His younger self will get by.

He kisses her when he drops her off, holding her as tight as he can without clinging to her. This cannot be anything but an ordinary night for her. He will keep that promise, despite all the oaths he's broken.

"See you around, Professor Song," he says with a cheeky edge, as if he'll see her again tomorrow. She laugh as she closes the door. He goes back to the TARDIS and wishes that he smoked or drank to excess or had any other destructive habit that would let him kill himself by inches in order to express some measure of his grief in some outward way. 

Instead he sits in the dark of the observatory, reciting the names of the stars one might see from the Earth in an effort to keep grief from crushing the voice out of him. 

"Ākhir an-nahr. Shuǐ Wěi yī. Alfecca Meridiana. Tseih She." 

He fails. That's nothing new.

IV. _Orpheus sang his grief to all who breathed the upper air, both gods and men, and finding it all unavailing resolved to seek his wife in the regions of the dead._

He is less without her. Even knowing that he might see her again given the wibbly-wobbly particularities of their timelines, he is diminished.

He could not face the Library a second time, even after he began to realize the scope of his love for her. He cannot face it now with the loss of her like a fresh wound, open and raw. He has never been back. It is cruel and it is selfish, but he cannot know a world without the hope of River Song in it. As long as he doesn't go back, he can imagine that she's happy in the Library, dreaming away her eternity. He hopes that they are lovely dreams, peaceful dreams. He knows that her sleep has always been restless. 

River. River who walked the line between madness and merriment with more grace than he's ever seen. River who bettered him. River who bested him.

He sits in the dark with his head in his hands, unheeding. He has lost all of them, River and her parents, and it will never be all right. Nothing will ever be all right. Every life he touches will fade out. Every hand he takes will be nothing but bones in his grasp. The TARDIS in desperation takes him to Victorian London, materializing in Vastra's sitting room. They take him in with open arms and no questions. He is certain that he wears his sorrow like a cloak, that he is a sulky, terrible guest. They are kinder than he deserves. He cannot express his gratitude. He tries not to resent their happiness. 

He walks the foggy streets and speaks to no one. The TARDIS disappears from the sitting room and reappears on a cloud. She is new inside, all blue lights and lovely gloom. Gallifreyan is everywhere - he is the only one who can read it now, but he leaves it for another day. He is afraid that he will find River's name, that the TARDIS has engraved their stories on the walls among the glyphs for the various controls. He cannot relive those memories yet, sweet as they are.

"You loved her too," he murmurs into the air, leaning with his palms on the control panel. "I'm sorry. I forget."

The TARDIS sighs.

V. _Accompanying the words with the lyre, he sung, “O deities of the underworld, to whom all we who live must come, hear my words, for they are true. I come to seek my wife, whose years were brought to an untimely end. Love has led me here, Love, a god all powerful with us who dwell on the earth, and, if old traditions say true, not less so here."_

Day by day he improves little by little. He can hardly bear the sight of books, but one rainy afternoon he runs out of anything else to do. Vastra has a lovely pocket-sized collection of mythology. It falls open to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice: an importuned marriage, a wife lost too soon, a grieving husband walking the paths of the dead to try to bring her back.

He closes the book with a snap. Would that he had the courage of Orpheus. In Berlin, he told her never to run when she was afraid. She has always followed his advice much better than he could. He would be ashamed of himself if he weren't so bloody proud of her and the magnificent person she became. She stands firm when he flinches. 

There must be a way to bring her back from the Library. She has been uploaded; surely she can be downloaded. Donna survived, after all. Even if he could never look at her again, knowing she was in her rightful place in the universe would be enough.

No, he's lying to himself. It would never be enough. Not for a moment would it be enough to exist on the same plane as River Song and not be able to touch her or to speak to her. But he would make it suffice. He would endure. 

He is building his strength against the heartbreak of seeing her in that place. He knows he may never succeed. 

VI. _"We all are destined to you, and sooner or later must pass to your domain. She too, when she shall have filled her term of life, will rightly be yours. But till then grant her to me, I beseech you. If you deny me I cannot return alone; you shall triumph in the death of us both."_

Some days are black. Some days he would rather be in CAL with her, lost in a fantasy of life. 

He would have given his life for her. And then she would have never existed, perhaps: no time crack, no Doctor at the wedding of the Ponds, no TARDIS to shelter the honeymooners in their wedded bliss. No child begat of time. No Silence irritated by his machinations to steal that child and mould her to their ends. No need for a bespoke psychopath. 

The thought of a universe that never knew River Song is worse than the guilt and misery that flood through him with every breath. There would have always been an empty space without her. Ironic that the punishment for his sins was the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. He might celebrate his every misstep for bringing River to him, except that it would mean glorying in a loss of life, and that was never his intention. None of this was ever his intention. He was just a restless man who wanted to see the universe. He wanted to have adventures. He wanted to be steeped in wonder. How little he knew about anything then. 

It could never have happened any other way. That doesn't mean it hurts any less.

He is a madman in a box on a cloud, as ancient and cantankerous as any fairy tale villain. He would seclude himself, take himself away entirely, but he promised River he wouldn't be alone. He slumps in Vastra's chairs as Jenny makes more tea. 

Life goes on. He loathes and clings to the fact with equal passion.

VII. _Orpheus was permitted to take her away with him on one condition, that he should not turn around to look at her till they should have reached the upper air._

Clara happens; the Snowmen happen; the Great Intelligence is a thorn in his side. He summons up the will to thank Jenny and Vastra and Strax properly and take his leave. He takes the little book of mythology with him - he'll find her something nicer. The iron steps of the spiral staircase are slippery, and he is slightly winded when steps into the TARDIS. As soon as he touches the controls, there's a flash of white at the corner of his eye. At the corner of his eye, where he always longs to look. 

He remembers the story of Orpheus and his Eurydice. He will not turn. He will not speak, though her name trembles on his lips. She strolls around him. He watches her through his eyelashes, quick peeks like sips of water for a man who has been stumbling lost in the desert. 

"I love what you've done with the place," she says finally, and he could sob with relief. He touches the controls with fingers that fumble. "Can you hear me, sweetie? No? Just as well. I seem to be relatively insubstantial." She strokes the control panel with one finger. The TARDIS' hum changes. "Ooh, still hooked in to the telepathic interface. That's good to know."

It takes every bit of his strength to look through her, to not hear the words she says.

Step by stumbling step, he will lead her into the light. He will find a way.

VIII. _Under this condition they proceeded on their way, he leading, she following, through passages dark and steep, in total silence, till they had nearly reached the outlet into the cheerful upper world._

He knows it isn't quite her. She is still in the Library, so many bytes of data in the cloud. She doesn't eat or drink; she doesn't sleep; she doesn't do any of the things that living beings need to do. The best he can discern is that she is a data ghost, a sort of livestream of her copy in the Library, captured by a complicit TARDIS.

He kisses the console when he realizes. "Thank you," he murmurs to the zigzag plotter. 

He worries that this means that he will never see her in the flesh again. Her echo is always with him; he wonders what it would be like to travel with River and her ghost. He wonders if they would shout at him in unison. He wishes he had known. He would have made an even grander production of the Singing Towers. He would have convinced her to stay after Manhattan.

Enough. Even for a Time Lord, there are only so many second chances. She is there with him, and that's enough. 

He goes everywhere with a Song in his hearts and in the corner of his eye. Finally he is ready to seek another companion. He thinks of the soufflé girl trapped in a Dalek's case, the impossible girl from the _Alaska_ and from Victorian London all at once. 

"I've seen her before," River says thoughtfully as he pulls up information on the monitor, and that clinches it. But technology can't show him anything else. He'll wait for a sign. Patience has never been his strong suit, but he won't risk missing something. He needs the quiet to think. Funny how the Earth has become his home away from home. Everywhere, everywhen, and he still comes back to this place. He's in love, he supposes. He takes care of the things that he loves, knowing how easily they might be lost. River watches him paint in the monastery. 

"A dab hand, aren't you, sweetie?" she teases. "You might have painted me. I can't imagine I wasn't impossible enough for you."

In his mind he says a million witty things. In the stone room, the only sound is the gentle stroke of the brush on the canvas and the splash as he rinses his brushes.

And then the impossible girl phones, given his number by a woman in a shop, and it could only have been River or Martha, and he fumbles everything trying to get to her. Maybe she'll show him the little shop. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, but then he's swept up in the mystery of Clara. At least he's not traveling alone. He'll never travel alone again. 

River is in the tracks of his tears, that old Smokey Robinson tune. She is with him when Clara is discovered, when she is uploaded and downloaded and his hearts leap with dizzy, maddening hope. She is in Merry's song as they sing to the parasite of Akhaten. She is in the submarine when Clara hums along to "Hungry Like The Wolf" (and there's the memory of Rose aching like a bad tooth alongside the shade of River). He thinks of the old nursery rhyme - _and she shall have music wherever she goes_. He listens with all his hearts. She is there when jazz rasps through the Caliburn mansion. Time after time, she is with him. 

One night while he dozes, he can feel her near him. She brushes his hair off his forehead; he can feel the tickle of it. He dares not move. She can _touch_ him. The bed doesn't move under her weight, but she can touch him.

He has never been so happy, nor so achingly, desperately sad.

"I wish," she says quietly, but doesn't finish the thought. After a moment, he feels her lie down next to him. He squeezes his eyes shut. 

IX. _Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she was borne away. Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air! Dying now a second time, she yet cannot reproach her husband, for how can she blame his impatience to behold her? "Farewell," she said, "a last farewell," —and was hurried away, so fast that the sound hardly reached his ears._

Trenzalore. 

A tombstone in the wrong place, though the sham is scarcely less bleak than the reality. He touches the engraved letters of her name. Even though it isn't her resting place, he mourns her all over again. She deserves a better marker. She was always a general, never a foot soldier. 

River speaking to Clara, more real with every breath. River with all the answers, because River always knows. 

The Whispermen with their promise of oblivion, and he, selfish man, is never ready to go.

His TARDIS in ruins, twined with ivy. 

His life etched in light, every wrong turn he ever took, and every righteous deed too. He would follow those traces if he could, relive every moment with River. 

His life, erased story by story. River's life in peril.

And at the last, River, desperate, shouting at him. River's wrist caught in his fingers. River in his arms. 

"If you ever loved me," she says, and he could slap himself for not reassuring her a thousand times, for never really showing her. All that wasted time. Hope shines in her eyes. 

He makes one last promise.

River fading. 

River gone, but never really gone. He will never be without her. He will face his darkest deeds with her light in his eyes.

With nothing left to lose, he steps into the timestream to find Clara, the last remnant of the best of him.

X. _Ah, see, he dies! / Yet even in death Eurydice he sung, / Eurydice still trembled on his tongue: / Eurydice the woods / Eurydice the floods / Eurydice the rocks and hollow mountains rung._

It was the best. It was fantastic. But every story ends. 

Even the Doctor couldn't run forever.

XI. _His shade passed a second time to Tartarus, where he sought out his Eurydice and embraced her with eager arms. They roam the happy fields together now, sometimes he leading, sometimes she; and Orpheus gazes as much as he will upon her, no longer incurring a penalty for a thoughtless glance._

He wakes up. A strange sensation. He's in a bed, but not his own. In a house. And at the edge of his bed, a vision in white.

"Hello, sweetie," River says tenderly, brushing the hair from his forehead. He reaches for her, cupping her face in his hands, and she leans down to kiss him. Oh, he's missed her, every scent and texture of her, the pressure of her lips and the heat of her skin.

"Is this real?" he whispers, nuzzling at her just to feel the brush of her skin against his. She laughs, low and rich. 

"As real as can be," she assures him. 

"What happened?" he asks, sitting up.

She shrugs elegantly. "I was going to ask you."

"You weren't with me?" he asks. 

She smiles. "No more than I ever am, my love."

"Then you should know the whole story," he murmurs. 

"My Doctor," she says with warmth in her voice. "We're in the biggest library ever. I think we can find out."

"It doesn't matter," he says, reaching for her hand. "I never read the last page."

"No, you never do," she says. "Anyway, my diary's out of paper. Any famous last words before we write our epilogue?"

"It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known," he quotes, and their afterword begins with the bells of her laughter.


End file.
